The block reward will continue to repeatedly halve over time until it reaches zero and dramatically decreases the incentive to mine. That requires no changes.

>"Why can't my car do 600km/h, it can only do 200km/h?" "Nothing is stopping it. Board a maglev train and you can do far more than 200 km/h."

Going by this analogy, you are commenting on an article about maglev trains. The article is about lightning network transactions. So you've gone completely off-topic? Why even talk about "transaction costs of the blockchain itself" if you think lightning transactions arent bitcoin transactions?

>What do off-chain transactions like Lightning have to do with the transaction costs of the blockchain itself?

Facilitating off-chain transactions lowers demand for on-chain transactions. Off-chain transactions arent possible without the underlying blockchain, yet they can fulfill the use-case of small bitcoin transactions. You can't separate the two.

>All sorts of things could change this - changes in the protocol to allow bigger blocks, changes in the hashrate that most miners are willing to invest, changes in mining hardware efficiency etc. But what you are claiming...

Back up the comment chain you were arguing that changing electricity prices etc would not affect the energy usage... I think you have changed what you are arguing about. Previously you disagreed with this:

"Bitcoin use and mining power are completely uncorrelated. By mining bitcoins, your earn as much as the computational fraction you are representing. So, indeed, there was a race to more and more mining power in the recent years but it can completely be reversed. For example if electricity prices rises."